When my daughter was an infant, my husband I learned that she’d been born with a medical condition that required us to take her to specialists. Over a period of years, various doctors performed invasive procedures on our baby over and over again.

At times, I was enlisted as an assistant and forced to hold my tiny child down on the exam table as medical professionals performed procedures that I can only describe as horrific.

On more than one occasion, I asked the doctor why my child wasn’t processing the experiences that were happening to her as sexual abuse. After all, from where I stood as an observing parent, the procedures looked like sexual abuse. And my child didn’t have the verbal skills to define them in a “medical” category, as opposed to a “sexual assault” category. My baby only knew what she felt–pure and unadulterated terror–an instinctual trauma response.

So why wouldn’t my child–who was traumatized over and over again in a medical setting without having the verbal skills to define her experience–not develop PTSD in the same way a soldier or abuse survivor would?

The truth of the matter is, she did because she had no way to compensate for the “locked in” memories, once the left side of her tiny brain shut down and trapped the experience in the right side of her brain.

The American Psychological Association describes trauma as “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster.” Preverbal and early childhood medical trauma are as real as is adult medical trauma. Someone you know is suffering, and they probably don’t know why.